Smartphone company Essential, which is founded by Android co-creator Andy Rubin, has finally made official a $300 million funding round first reported in June. The funding round comes from investors including Tencent, as well as Amazon’s Alexa Fund, among others. Essential also revealed new information about its retail launch, including retail partners Amazon and Best Buy who will be… Read More

The EFF has filed a court filing pressing for warrants be required for searches of mobile phones, laptops and other digital devices by federal agents at international airports and U.S. land borders — describing these as “highly intrusive forays into travelers’ private information”. Read More

This is the story of a guy who found a niche and stuck with it. The guy is a programmer named Nick who was worried about Apple’s wireless AirPods. He thought they looked stupid.
“I didn’t have particularly high hopes when Apple first announced AirPods. I figured they would sound like their wired EarPods, which are fine but not particularly impressive. I was blown away when… Read More

On the heels of a $25 million funding round, connected device maker Tile is today rolling out a more premium line of lost item trackers, with the launch of its Tile Pro series. The line today includes two new devices, a dark slate-and-graphite Tile Sport and a white-and-gold Tile Style. Beyond their more fashionable look, these Pro trackers include upgraded internals, allowing the devices to… Read More

Last week, Apple accidentally released a firmware for the HomePod. This file is filled with references to unreleased Apple devices. According to strings in a library file spotted by Guilherme Rambo, the next Apple TV is going to support 4K videos as well as Dolby Vision, HDR10 and Hybrid Log-Gamma. Read More

Apple just dropped a brand new beta for your favorite iOS update of the year. While iOS 11 isn’t coming out until September, the company has been testing the new version for a couple of months already. I still don’t recommend installing the beta on a device you use every day, unless you’re willing to live with bugs, crashes and poor performance.
The fifth beta is only… Read More

Gizmo maker Apple just launched its official Instagram account, @apple. But this isn’t your average corporate account as the company doesn’t want to showcase its own product ad nauseam. Instead, Apple is going to share photos shot with an iPhone.
In many ways, this Instagram account feels like the natural extension of the “Shot on iPhone” billboard ad campaign. Read More

Apple’s HomePod firmware is the gift that keeps on giving. When the company shared an early build of the speaker firmware, many developers started digging around the strings in a library file to find hints about the next iPhone. And iHelp BR spotted an interesting reference to the facial recognition feature.
A previous leak from the HomePod firmware revealed that the iPhone 8 (or… Read More

After weeks and months of leaks, the Galaxy S8 Active hasn’t left much to the imagination. We’ve already seen the phone from virtually every angle and got a sneak peek of a prematurely launched carrier page last week, to boot. The only thing left was for Samsung to officially make the thing official.
The company’s doing just that this morning, a day before the rugged… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

Apple is reportedly working on an Apple Watch that won’t have to be tethered to your phone for data, freeing that small fitness tracker on your wrist from the oppressive confines of having to carry around a now-critical piece of technology for operating in your daily life.
This will probably have repercussions for the battery life of the watch that you have to charge every evening. Read More

Developed by Israel-based OTM Technologies, Phree is a digital pen that you can use to, in the words of the CEO, express yourself anywhere, anytime on any surface. Well, almost any surface. It doesn’t write on glass, and it writes ineffectively on bumpy surfaces like crackers, as demonstrated by Gilad Lederer, OTM co-founder and CEO. Read More

As we all know, the bee population is declining at an alarming rate, and while the causes are many, the solutions are few. At the very least, beekeepers need to keep an extra-close eye on their hives — which can be difficult when there are a few thousand of them. A Canadian researcher is working on a monitoring system that listens to the buzz and passes on word if things are going south. Read More

If you own a Google Home, you’re already on the cutting-edge of future-dwelling space astronauts who can shout things at their house and have it respond. Want to be even more cutting-edge? Though it hasn’t been formally announced, it looks like Google is working on a Google Home preview program that’ll grant early access to upcoming Home features to those who opt in. Read More

A product that began life as an April Fools joke has graduated to a real thing you can order right now: Hyperkin’s SmartBoy is an accessory for Android smartphones with a USB-C connector, and brings Game Boy-style physical controls and actual Game Boy game cartridge compatibility to the gaming device you carry with you everywhere in your pocket anyways.
The Hyperkin SmartBoy is up… Read More

Streaming music service Spotify should finally make its way to Microsoft’s Xbox One sometime soon, as a report from The Verge confirms user posts from Reddit that a beta version of the app is being tested internally at Xbox. The Spotify app has been available on PlayStation 4 since 2015, so its arrival on Microsoft’s current console seems overdue for Xbox gaming Spotify… Read More

GoPro is flying high and mighty after releasing its 2017 second-quarter earnings. The camera company took in $297 million in revenue equaling a non-GAAP loss of 9 cents per share. This was way above Wall Street’s expectations, as the general consensus was that GoPro would report revenue of $269 million with a loss of 25 cents per share. That’s growth any way you slice it. Read More

“Wait for the green light and let go,” the Cadillac engineer instructed. That’s it. The car was driving itself. I, the person behind the steering wheel, was no longer the driver. Cadillac’s Super Cruise system was driving.
The 2018 Cadillac CT6 sped along US-23 under the direction of Super Cruise. Traffic was light and the weather was perfect. The system held the… Read More